修行会

Introduction

Ueshiba Morihei’s religious language has long posed a problem for interpretation. As Margaret Greenhalgh (2003) observed, Ueshiba described aikidō in explicitly spiritual terms, and his symbolic vocabulary drew not only on Shinto kami discourse but also on Shingon esoteric Buddhism. That wider religious frame matters, because in Kūkai’s Shingon thought the body, speech, and mind of the practitioner participate in the cosmic activity of the Buddha through the “three mysteries”, making bodily action itself a possible site of realization rather than a merely external form. Read in that light, Ueshiba’s language cannot be dismissed as ornamental mysticism or reduced to modern ethical sloganizing; it belongs to a Japanese religious idiom in which posture, breath, utterance, and cosmology remain tightly intertwined (Greenhalgh, 2003; Takahashi, 1986).

This article approaches that larger problem through a deliberately narrow philological lens: the graph 立. In modern translation, 立 is easily flattened into the default sense “to stand”. Yet the Kojiki itself marks the graph as semantically charged. In the cosmogonic opening, the name Ame-no-Tokotachi is accompanied by the gloss 「訓立云多知」, explicitly directing the reader to tachi; elsewhere, the land-formation episode preserves a special reading that clarifies the deity’s placement on Ame-no-Ukihashi. Kokugakuin’s commentaries further show that Tokotachi has been read not simply as “ever-standing”, but as the emergence or establishment of a primordial ground or generative place. These features make 立 an especially fruitful point of entry into the relation between mythic diction and later religious discourse (Kokugakuin University, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c, 2025).

Tracing 立 across the Kojiki, selected dōka, and the oral teachings recorded in Takemusu Aiki, this study argues that Ueshiba’s usage unfolds within a layered semantic field that includes not only standing, but also emergence, establishment, centered ritual posture, principled standpoint, useful service, and generative emplacement. Its aim is therefore not to force a choice between a “Shinto” and a “Buddhist” Ueshiba, but to show how Kojiki-Shinto cosmology and Shingon/Vajrayana embodiment converge in his language of practice. By focusing on a single graph across mythic, poetic, and oral registers, the article contributes to Japanese religious studies, martial arts studies, and translation studies alike: it demonstrates how close attention to script, reading glosses, and lexical texture can reopen the religious world presupposed by aikidō’s foundational texts (Greenhalgh, 2003; Takahashi, 1986).

Analysis

Regarding “Aikidō Secrets” Dōka

In the Kojiki, 立 is not just a generic verb meaning “to stand”, but a marked graph whose reading and force are sometimes built into the text itself. In the opening cosmogonic passage, the compilers gloss 天之常立神 with 「訓常云登許、訓立云多知」, explicitly fixing 立 as tachi in the divine name; the Kokugakuin deity entries then show that tokotachi has been read not only as “ever-standing” or “eternally abiding”, but also as the appearance of a primordial foundation or generative place. In the land-formation episode, the same tradition again singles the graph out by noting that 立 in the Floating Bridge of Heaven scene is to be read tatashi, the scene in which Izanagi and Izanami stand over the sea and Onogoro forms. The wider Kojiki field also includes 八雲立つ, where 立 shades toward rising or emerging rather than mere static posture. Taken together, those materials make clear that 立 in mythic diction can denote stance, emergence, establishment, or ontological grounding, and that any translation sensitive to Kojiki echoes should resist flattening the word to a single English equivalent (Kokugakuin University, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c, 2025, n.d.-d).

Against that background, the Shugyokai translations are most persuasive when they preserve the grammatical and rhetorical variety of 立 rather than normalizing it. Dōka 21 closes on tachikeri, and the page is right to stress that -keri is a realized-discovery ending, so “I am already behind” captures the poem’s flash of belated recognition better than a flat past tense would. Dōka 22 keeps tachimukau as “standing and facing”, preserving the bodily and formal weight of the compound. Dōka 34 is especially important because the notes prefer まが as 間が, “the interval / opening”, so 後に立ちて is not simply “stand behind” but the completion of a ma-ai tactic in which the foe cuts into an opening and the practitioner appears at the rear. Dōka 42 then inverts the value of negation: tatanu iwa is not a rock that “fails to stand”, but one that stands fast, unbudging, and the page’s treatment of ことふる as a kakekotoba (“to proclaim” / “to wear out by over-telling”) sharpens the contrast between pure natural resonance and exhausted discourse. Even dōka 45, though it contains no 立, belongs in this cluster because it supplies the directional lattice—前後左右—within which these acts of standing, turning, and appearing-at-the-rear make sense (Ueshiba, 1977/2025a, 1977/2025b, 1977/2025c, 1977/2025d, 1977/2025e).

The cosmological group makes the Kojiki connection much more explicit. Read in sequence, dōka 110, 122, and 123 move from naka ni tachi to naka ni tatsu to tokotachi nashite / naka ni iku, and that grammatical progression matters. In 110, the ren’yōkei 立ち（たち; tachi） leaves the act of standing suspended into 心構え（こころがまえ; kokoro-gamae）, so “standing in the center” flows directly into an inner stance; in 122, the conclusive 立つ（たつ; tatsu） states the centered posture more directly, while the restoration of the ellipsed object marker in 心を磨け（こころをみがけ; kokoro o migake） is a defensible editorial choice because it regularizes the waka line and makes the ethical labor of polishing the heart-mind explicit. In both pages, “center” is carefully glossed not as a point-center but as a mediating middle between heaven and earth, tied to 気結び（きむすび; ki-musubi）and to 山彦の道（やまびこのみち; yamabiko no michi）as a way of responsive resonance. Dōka 123 is the most consequential special reading in the whole set: 常立（とこたち; tokotachi） is not flattened into a generic adjective such as “ever-standing”, but retained as Tokotachi, so the translation preserves Ueshiba’s play between primordial deity-name and ethical immovability. That is exactly the kind of choice the Kojiki materials invite, because 天之常立神（あめのとこたちのかみ; ame no tokotachi no kami）and 国之常立神（くにのとこたちのかみ; kuni no tokotachi no kami）are already names in which the graph 立 has special force, and because the page’s “live in the center” for 中に生く（なかにいく; naka ni iku） turns posture into ontology rather than mere technique (Ueshiba, 1977/2025f, 1977/2025g, 1977/2025h; Kokugakuin University, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c).

The final group shows that once centered standing has been secured, 立 can widen into manifestation, guidance, institution, and epiphany. Though dōka 126 contains no 立 at all, it turns to the nonstandard reading 靈出（ひで; hide）, so what was stabilized in standing now issues forth as serpent-surge, bee-springing, merely two examples of limitless forms of takemusu generation. Dōka 151 brings the verb back as 立つぞ案内に（たつぞあないに; tatsu zo anai ni）: the page’s insistence on the classical reading あない（anai） for 案内 is crucial, because the line means not just “stand up” but “stand forth as guide”. Dōka 155 shifts the verb into a transitive-resultative frame—神の立てたる（かみのたてたる; kami no tatetaru）is “what the kami have established / ordained”, not “the gods standing”—and that is one of the clearest cases where English has to move from posture to institution. Dōka 160 then gathers the whole field into mythic topography: 勝速日立つ（かつはやびたつ; katsuhayabi tatsu）is rendered as a swift victorious arising or standing-forth on Ame-no-Ukihashi, and the page explicitly links 天の浮橋 to the Kojiki creation scene. That bridge is the very place where the Studies on the Kojiki chapter explains the special reading tatashi for 立, so the retention of forms such as Mioya and Ame-no-Ukihashi is not decorative exoticism but a philological decision to keep Ueshiba’s language inside a Kojiki-Shinto semantic field. The page even notes that 国のみ親 can, in that milieu, point toward primal kami such as Kuni-no-Tokotachi; that is best read as a theological echo rather than a fixed lexical identity. Overall, these translations are at their strongest when read as deliberately foreignizing: they often sacrifice smooth “colonizing” English in order to preserve bungo morphology, special readings, and mythic allusion, which is precisely what makes them useful in an appendix concerned with the semantics of 立 (Ueshiba, 1977/2025i, 1977/2025j, 1977/2025k, 1977/2025l; Kokugakuin University, 2025, n.d.-c).

Moving On to Oral Teachings of the “Principle Way”

A further layer appears in O-Sensei’s oral teachings as recorded by Takahashi (1986), where 立 moves out of tightly marked poetic diction and into a broader vocabulary of cultivation, posture, and manifestation. It is important, however, to distinguish between bare verbal uses of 立 and lexicalized forms such as 立派 (rippa). In the passages on bodily cultivation, Ueshiba says that through training the body and soul mature and “grow up splendidly”, and that once the self has been formed, one must “bring all things to splendid success” and protect the world. In these cases, 立派 should not be over-read as if it were a transparent repetition of the Kojiki’s special readings of 立; it is an ordinary Japanese word meaning “fine”, “admirable”, or “proper”. Even so, in Ueshiba’s rhetoric it still participates in the semantic field of upright completion: the human being is not merely improved, but brought into a state of fully realized, morally grounded form. That makes these oral passages a useful complement to the Kojiki material, where 立 can mark emergence or establishment; here it marks accomplished stature and spiritual adulthood (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 48–49, 51).

The most direct and important oral uses are the explicit ritual verbs in the third quotation: 「天台に立って」 and 「地球の中心に立って」. Here 立って is not a casual instruction about bodily posture, but a liturgical emplacement. To stand on the heavenly platform, face the eastern heavens, and stand at the center of the earth together with heaven, earth, and the myriad kami is to place the practitioner on a cosmic axis. In this register, 立 means something closer to “take one’s stand” or “be installed in position” than simply “stand upright”. This resonates strongly with the dōka discussed earlier, especially the repeated emphasis on 中に立ち / 中に立つ in dōka 110 and 122 and the preservation of Tokotachi in dōka 123. Across both the poems and the oral teachings, centered standing is not merely physical balance; it is mediating placement between heaven and earth, the bodily condition for gratitude, breath, harmony, and takemusu activity (Takahashi, 1986, p. 50).

The final quotation extends this semantics of standing into charisma and public authority: 「みかえる立って天下に号令する」. As transmitted in Takahashi, the phrasing is somewhat difficult to normalize without checking the underlying source tradition, but the force of 立って is still clear enough in context. This is not neutral standing in place. It is standing forth in a position from which one can issue command to the realm. The next sentence confirms that reading by describing the three worlds as looking up to the great sage and gladly accepting his words. In other words, 立 here approaches the sense of arising in authority, taking one’s stand before the world, or manifesting as a figure whose speech has ordering power. This use stands closer to the appendix’s earlier observations about 立 as manifestation and establishment than to a merely static bodily pose (Takahashi, 1986, p. 52).

Taken together, these oral quotations show that Ueshiba’s use of 立 spans several related but distinct values: ethical maturation and proper formedness (立派), ritual emplacement at the cosmological center (立って), and manifest authority or standing-forth before the world (立って天下に号令する). Unlike the Kojiki, these passages do not usually foreground special readings in a philological sense; their distinctiveness lies instead in the way apparently ordinary forms of 立 are made to carry cosmological and devotional weight. That is precisely why they belong beside the dōka and the Kojiki materials in an appendix on 立: they show the same graph functioning not only in archaic mythic naming and waka compression, but also in O-Sensei’s spoken theology of self-cultivation, prayer, gratitude, and world-order (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 48–52).

And then the Oral Teachings “Bestowed from Heaven”

A further cluster of oral usages shows 立 moving into the semantic field of constitution, establishment, and valid formation. In the passage that says 「法というものが成立ってくる」, 立 no longer means bodily standing at all, but the coming-into-being of an order: law or norm is something that “gets established” or “comes to stand as such”. The same shift appears in 「鎮魂神も成り立つ」, where the phrase means not that a deity literally stands, but that the state or operation of chinkon is properly constituted through prayer and misogi. These are important because they extend the earlier Kojiki-related sense of 立 as emergence or establishment into O-Sensei’s oral theology: ritual, law, and spiritual efficacy are things that must be made to “stand up” as realities, not merely contemplated as abstractions (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 58, 64).

The repeated use of 立派 in these pages should likewise be handled carefully. As noted earlier, 立派 is ordinarily a lexicalized adjective meaning admirable, proper, or fine, and it should not be forced into a naïve etymological reading each time it appears. Even so, in these oral passages its recurrence is striking: 「立派な地祇地場」, 「立派な営みの斎場」, 「地上は立派な営みの斎場にならなければならぬ」, 「立派に神に通じて」, and even 「立派な花園」 all describe a condition of fully realized rightness. The earth must become an adequate ritual ground; the practitioner must become properly connected to the divine; virtue flowers into a splendid heavenly garden. In this discourse, 立派 consistently marks not mere excellence in a modern, secular sense, but spiritually accomplished formedness. It indicates that something has been brought into its correct, ritually viable, cosmologically aligned condition (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 59, 61–62, 66).

Several passages then return to the more explicit verbal force of 立つ and 立って, and these are among the richest in the set. 「濃古ノ大神となって、天之浮橋に立つ」 is particularly important because it brings the oral teaching directly back into the mythic topography already noted in the dōka and Kojiki materials. To stand on Ame-no-Ukihashi is not just to occupy a location, but to take one’s place at the threshold of creation and purification. Likewise, 「祭政一致の本義に立って剣をもてば」 uses 立って in an idiom of principled standpoint: one wields the sword while standing on, or grounded in, the fundamental truth of the unity of rite and governance. In both cases, 立 marks authorized positioning—mythic in the first, doctrinal in the second. It is a verb of emplacement within a larger order, not merely one of posture (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 61, 63).

Another revealing development appears in humble-service expressions such as 「私は人のお役に立たせて頂いて有難い」. Here 立 survives in the common idiom 役に立つ, “to be of use”, but the added causative-benefactive framing—“to be allowed to serve” or “to be allowed to be useful”—gives the phrase specifically religious weight. Service is not presented as self-assertion, but as grace-enabled usefulness before others and before the kami. This matters because it broadens the appendix’s picture of 立 even further: alongside standing, establishing, and manifesting, there is also usefulness, efficacy, and beneficial function. In O-Sensei’s oral register, 立 is thus not only ontological and ritual, but also ethical and relational (Takahashi, 1986, p. 65).

The culminating line, 「私はその最初の産屋となって立つのです」, is perhaps the most concentrated expression in this group. Here 立つ again exceeds simple uprightness. To “stand as the first birth-house” is to become an originating site of generation, a place in which emergence can occur. This is especially resonant beside the earlier discussion of Tokotachi, ki-musubi, and the creation scene on Ame-no-Ukihashi: standing becomes generative station, a position from which life, order, and right form come forth. Read across these pages, O-Sensei’s oral usage of 立 spans at least five linked values—constitution, realized adequacy, principled standpoint, useful service, and generative emplacement. That breadth helps explain why the graph remains so important across the spoken teachings, the dōka, and the Kojiki background alike (Takahashi, 1986, pp. 61–67).

A Counter-Buddhist Perspective

A Buddhist counter-reading would caution against treating 立 in Ueshiba’s discourse as primarily or exclusively Kojiki-Shinto in force. In Buddhist scholastic vocabulary, 立 very often belongs not to primordial standing or cosmological emplacement, but to the work of doctrinal construction: 立義分 is literally a “section on positing the meaning”, 義立 is the articulation of a doctrinal claim, 法假安立 is a “nominal definition of dharma”, and Buddhist dictionaries summarize entire scholastic systems by saying that schools “establish dharmas” in sets of seventy-five, eighty-four, or one hundred. From this angle, 立 frequently means to posit, define, classify, or institute, not to stand in a mythic or embodied sense.

The same is true in Buddhist logic, where 立 is even more overtly argumentative. DILA’s glossaries define 立破 as “to establish and refute”, and 能立 as the valid establishment of one’s thesis through proper reason and example; conversely, 似立宗 is a pseudo-proposition, a thesis only seemingly established. In this register, 立 has almost nothing to do with posture. It belongs to inferential force, debate, and the successful constitution of a claim. That is an important counterweight for reading O-Sensei, because expressions such as 本義に立って or 成立ってくる can plausibly resonate with a broader Sino-Buddhist discourse of standing on a proposition, principle, or correctly established teaching, rather than only with archaic mythic standing.

A Yogācāra-Madhyamaka perspective complicates things further by making 安立 and 建立 signs of conceptual imputation rather than ontological solidity. One Saṃdhinirmocana passage says that something is “established by provisional naming” (由假名安立為相), “not established by intrinsic characteristic” (非由自相安立為相); related materials speak of “establishing the person” (安立補特伽羅) and “establishing the imagined nature of dharmas” (安立諸法遍計所執自性). On this reading, what is “set up” by thought and language is precisely what should not be mistaken for self-existing reality. That offers a strong counter-perspective to any reading that would automatically thicken every occurrence of 立 into sacred presence or primordial standing-forth.

Chan provides a different but equally important counterpoint through the slogan 不立文字. The DILA glossaries define this as a teaching “that does not establish words and letters”, while the Stanford Encyclopedia summarizes Chan’s fourfold self-description as “a special transmission outside the scriptures; not established upon words and letters; directly pointing to the human heart-mind; seeing nature and becoming a Buddha”. Crucially, the traditional gloss preserved in DILA also warns against misunderstanding this as simply throwing texts away: the problem is fixation, not language as such. In Chan, then, 立 is negated not because standing is unimportant, but because awakening is not to be founded on textual signs as final supports. That is a very different semantic world from the Kojiki’s marked divine names and creation scenes.

Finally, Buddhist sūtra literature often uses standing in a far more ordinary ritual sense. In one Diamond Sūtra recension, Subhūti “rose from his seat” (即從座起), knelt, and then “stood reverently” (恭敬而立) before speaking to the Buddha. Here 立 marks liturgical decorum and audience posture, not cosmogonic emergence. This does not cancel the Kojiki resonances in Ueshiba, but it does suggest a more plural genealogy: some of his uses of 立って may be read just as naturally through Buddhist registers of reverent stance, doctrinal standpoint, conceptual establishment, or useful efficacy as through Shinto mythic standing. As an interpretive method, then, it may be best not to force a single genealogy for 立, but to let Shinto, Buddhist, and broader Sino-Japanese semantic layers remain in productive tension.

The Esoteric Shingon Perspective

Moving on, rather than setting Buddhist usage of 立 against the Kojiki material, a more productive approach is to read Ueshiba’s language through the esoteric Buddhist understanding of the body as a site of realization. In Kūkai’s Shingon thought, enlightenment is not a purely mental event but an embodied one, enacted through the “three mysteries” of body, speech, and mind; the practitioner’s bodily acts, uttered sounds, and mental visualizations participate in the cosmic activity of Mahāvairocana. In that framework, “standing” is never merely postural. It is a form of ritual emplacement within a larger mandalic order. This helps illuminate Ueshiba’s recurrent language of standing at the center, standing on Ame-no-Ukihashi, or standing as an originating place of birth and formation: these can be read not only as mythic images but as acts of embodied consecration, in which the practitioner takes his place within a sacralized cosmos (Krummel, 2006/2022; Takahashi, 1986, pp. 50, 61, 67).

A Shingon-inflected reading also helps clarify why so many of Ueshiba’s uses of 立 shade toward establishment, constitution, and realized efficacy rather than simple uprightness. Buddhist lexica preserve this usage very clearly: 「安立智」 is the wisdom that “establishes correct practice and enables others to cultivate it”, esoteric Buddhism “sets forth” or “establishes” doctrinal bodies such as the three- and four-body schemes, and Shingon’s doctrine of 即身成佛 teaches that this very body can become Buddha, with body and mind already corresponding to the two mandalas and brought to realization through empowerment and the practice of the three mysteries. Read in that light, expressions in Ueshiba such as 「成立ってくる」, 「成り立つ」, 「本義に立って」, and even the recurrent 「立派」 are not accidental diction: they point toward the making-real of a rite, a ground, a person, or a world that has been properly established in accord with cosmic truth (DILA, n.d.a, n.d.b, n.d.c, n.d.d; Takahashi, 1986, pp. 58, 63–64).

This reading is also historically plausible for Ueshiba’s own religious vocabulary. A substantial study of Aikidō and Shingon Mikkyo notes that Ueshiba described aikidō not only in Shinto terms but also through Shingon geometric symbolism, invoked figures such as Amida, Fudō Myōō, and Kannon, and appears to have incorporated Tantric exercises into his daily spiritual discipline. The same study reports Kisshomaru Ueshiba’s suggestion that Morihei’s familiarity with Shingon teaching prepared him to assimilate Ōmoto notions such as kotodama, and it cites Hakeda’s observation that esoteric Buddhism and Shinto share important common elements: the oneness of human being and nature, the efficacy of sacred sound, and the idea of a ritually consecrated realm. On that basis, Ueshiba’s uses of 立 need not be forced into an either/or choice between Kojiki archaism and Buddhist discourse; they can be understood as operating in a deliberately fused idiom in which mythic standing and esoteric consecration reinforce one another (Greenhalgh, 2003; Niehaus, 2024; Takahashi, 1986, pp. 59–61).

Seen this way, the oral passages about turning the earth into a 斎場 or 地場, standing at the center of heaven and earth, and becoming the first 産屋 are not simply poetic embellishments. They describe a ritual technology of world-making. Kūkai’s esoteric model culminates in the claim that, once realization matures, every bodily movement becomes mudrā, every utterance mantra, and every thought samādhi. That is an especially fruitful lens for Ueshiba’s language, because it allows 立 to name the moment when posture becomes rite, place becomes mandala, and action becomes salvific function. The contribution of this Buddhist supplement, then, is not to displace the Kojiki reading of 立, but to show that in Ueshiba’s idiom the graph often carries a double inheritance: it is at once archaic-cosmogonic and esoteric-performative (Krummel, 2006/2022; Greenhalgh, 2003; Takahashi, 1986, pp. 61–67).

Discussion

The evidence gathered here suggests that 立 in Ueshiba Morihei’s religious-martial language should not be translated or interpreted through a single default gloss. In the Kojiki, the graph carries marked force in passages where reading glosses and divine names signal more than ordinary standing: Tokotachi points toward primordial establishment, while the creation scene at Ame-no-Ukihashi binds 立 to emplacement at the threshold of world-formation (Kokugakuin University, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, 2025). In Ueshiba’s dōka and oral teachings, that semantic field remains active, but it broadens. Here, 立 can denote centered posture, principled standpoint, ritual installation, accomplished maturity, useful service, and even generative vocation (Takahashi, 1986; Ueshiba, 1977/2025f, 1977/2025g, 1977/2025h, 1977/2025l). The result is a vocabulary in which bodily stance and cosmological order are repeatedly made to mirror one another.

This has two larger implications. First, it suggests that Ueshiba’s language is best approached as a layered religious idiom rather than as a merely inspirational or idiosyncratic rhetoric. The Kojiki background helps explain why standing in the “center” or on the “Floating Bridge of Heaven” carries ontological and mythic weight, while a Shingon-inflected esoteric frame clarifies why bodily position, breath, utterance, and intention can function as acts of consecration rather than simple metaphors (Kokugakuin University, n.d.-a, n.d.-c; Takahashi, 1986). Second, it shows why translation matters so much. When marked readings, archaic inflections, and mythic names are overly normalized, the textual world contracts; when they are preserved with care, Ueshiba’s discourse emerges not as obscure ornamentation, but as a disciplined attempt to articulate practice as world-making.

The broader contribution of this study, then, is methodological as much as philological. For martial arts studies, it argues that Aikidō sources reward close reading at the level of graph, inflection, and intertext. For Japanese religious studies, it offers a concrete case of how mythic, esoteric, and modern spoken registers remain entangled in twentieth-century discourse. For translators and practitioners, it proposes that terms built on 立 often demand interpretive patience: what appears to be a simple verb may in fact name a stance before the cosmos, an ethical posture toward others, or a ritual act by which a place, body, or world is made fit for divine activity.

Coda

In the end, the question is not only what 立 means, but what kind of life it asks one to inhabit. In these texts, to stand is never merely to be upright. It is to take one’s place, to be rightly situated between heaven and earth, to become useful to others, and to let body, breath, and word participate in a larger order. Ueshiba’s language returns again and again to this quiet demand: not simply to move well, but to stand well. And perhaps that is why the graph matters so much. A single character, easily passed over, becomes the hinge between posture and prayer, between myth and practice, between the formation of the self and the care of the world.

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Ueshiba, M. (2025a). 植芝盛平道歌–021: Already behind (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/r2y1

Ueshiba, M. (2025b). 植芝盛平道歌–022: Their heart-mind, my little shield (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/81ia

Ueshiba, M. (2025c). 植芝盛平道歌–034: Behind my figure (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/yrr3

Ueshiba, M. (2025d). 植芝盛平道歌–042: No one to proclaim it (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/nhf9

Ueshiba, M. (2025e). 植芝盛平道歌–045: Rousing a foe, many surround (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/hzxc

Ueshiba, M. (2025f). 植芝盛平道歌–110: Ki, knotted into being (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/k6xx

Ueshiba, M. (2025g). 植芝盛平道歌–122: Bind ki-musubi deep (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/r4wk

Ueshiba, M. (2025h). 植芝盛平道歌–123: Love as a guarding stance (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/ilrd

Ueshiba, M. (2025i). 植芝盛平道歌–126: Serpent surging, bee springing (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/9sa4

Ueshiba, M. (2025j). 植芝盛平道歌–151: Straightening the strands (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/gmmv

Ueshiba, M. (2025k). 植芝盛平道歌–155: Futomani misogi (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/tkbi

Ueshiba, M. (2025l). 植芝盛平道歌–160: By divine word (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/62q2

Appendix I: Change Modification Log

14 MAR 26 - Clarified pronunciations and readings of certain terms in hirigana / romanized text for readability, guidance, and expeditious re-encoding (i.e., objectivative internalization); minor edits.